Say It Well Summary: Terry Szuplat on Finding Your Speaking Voice

Key Ideas

1. Start with material you can speak about honestly

Szuplat's early emphasis on personal story and saying what only you can say addresses a familiar temptation: borrowing someone else's impressive speaking personality. A presentation can become more fluent while becoming less credible. Personal voice depends partly on choosing material you understand, care about and can discuss without pretending to possess experience you do not have.

The volunteer coordinator starts with a grand statement about transforming lives. She has used the program's publicity language, but she cannot explain what the statement means in an ordinary conversation. A more useful starting point is something she directly knows: a learner who wanted enough confidence to read a workplace notice independently. She must ask permission before using any identifiable story, and she may instead use an explicitly fictional illustration when privacy makes that preferable.

For your own talk, list a few moments that explain your connection to the subject. Next to each, record what you actually witnessed, what someone else told you and what you are inferring. That distinction protects a personal story from becoming an embellished claim. Choose the moment that illuminates the audience's task rather than the one that makes you look most impressive.

Authenticity does not require intimate disclosure. You can speak in your own voice while maintaining boundaries around family, colleagues or clients. The practical question is whether the material is yours to use and whether you can stand behind its meaning. A modest account told accurately often gives you more room to speak naturally than a borrowed heroic narrative.

2. Design an experience for the people in the room

One early chapter asks what a speech really is. The publisher's description also emphasizes emotional connection. Our application is to judge a presentation by the experience it offers listeners, rather than by the number of points it allows the speaker to deliver. The audience needs a route through the material and a reason to follow it.

At the library welcome, people arrive with different assumptions. One expects to teach a formal class; another worries that volunteers need a specialist qualification. A long account of the library's history answers neither concern. The coordinator can begin by naming the practical situation: volunteers help adults practice everyday reading tasks, with training and support. She then describes one typical session before explaining the next step in joining.

Before drafting, write what listeners should understand by the end and what they should be able to do with that understanding. These are our planning questions, not a reproduced Szuplat checklist. They reveal what deserves space and what can move to a handout. If a detail does not help the immediate purpose, being interesting may not be enough to justify including it.

Design for actual listeners as well as an imagined average audience. Explain unfamiliar terms, make visuals readable and describe essential information aloud. Leave an accessible written route to the next step. Audience focus is more concrete than repeatedly saying that people matter: it changes your examples, sequence, language and use of time. It also leaves room for a listener to decline the invitation without being treated as a communication failure.

3. Give stories and evidence different jobs

The book attends to storytelling, values and truthfulness. Those subjects belong together because an engaging story can make an idea memorable without proving every conclusion attached to it. A responsible speaker needs to distinguish the meaning of one experience from the scope of an evidence-based claim. Emotional connection should make the subject clearer, not make scrutiny seem disloyal.

Suppose the coordinator describes a learner successfully completing a form. That can show what a session might involve. It cannot establish that every learner will reach the same outcome, that one method caused the change or that volunteering produces a measurable result within a fixed period. If the program has evaluated outcomes, she can state what the evaluation actually measured and explain its limits in ordinary language.

Try marking each paragraph of a draft as an example, a claim, an explanation or an invitation. A paragraph may do more than one job, but the exercise helps expose unsupported jumps. Ask where a listener could reasonably wonder how you know. Check that source before adding stronger language. If a story combines several experiences, call it a composite instead of presenting it as one documented event.

Values also need care. An audience may share a concern about adult independence while disagreeing about the best program design. You can connect the concern to the proposal without assuming agreement on everything. This gives the talk a firmer ethical basis: listeners can feel why the work matters while retaining the information and freedom needed to judge the invitation.

4. Write sentences that can survive being spoken

Szuplat's contents include human language and the sound of the writing, followed later by editing and rehearsal. The distinction between a readable document and a usable speech is central to our application. Listeners must make sense of a sentence as it unfolds. They cannot reliably hold several qualifications in memory while waiting for the main point.

The coordinator's draft says that volunteers will facilitate the delivery of individualized literacy support interventions. In conversation she would say that volunteers help an adult practice reading something they need in daily life. The second wording is easier to follow and makes it possible to picture the work. It does not remove the need for training or imply that every task is simple.

Read one paragraph aloud without trying to rescue it through expressive delivery. Notice where you lose the thread, run out of breath or emphasize a word that carries little meaning. Split a sentence if the listener must wait too long for its point. Replace an abstract noun with a concrete action when that preserves accuracy. Keep a technical term when it matters, but define it before relying on it.

Then ask someone unfamiliar with the project to describe what they understood. Their answer is a better test than their willingness to compliment the prose. If the response misses the point, investigate the wording and sequence before blaming attention. Clear speech does not have to be simplistic. It gives complex material enough structure, examples and pauses that an audience can follow it without already knowing the answer.

5. Rehearse the whole communication, including the ending

The final part of the book covers improving a speech and delivering it. This comes after chapters on truth and action, which suggests a useful order for practice: establish what the talk is doing, then rehearse how people will receive it. Polishing delivery is worthwhile, but it should support an intelligible message and a feasible ending.

Our coordinator first rehearses only the opening because she wants to stop feeling nervous. The middle remains too long, and the final invitation gets rushed. A full rehearsal exposes the problem. She can shorten the institutional background, make the volunteer example more focused and leave enough time to explain the orientation session. She also practices what happens if a slide fails, rather than assuming the equipment will carry the message.

Run through the talk at speaking pace and include transitions, visual descriptions and the final practical instruction. A timed silent reading is a different activity. Ask one rehearsal listener to identify the central point and another to locate a moment of confusion. Take notes before defending the draft. Feedback becomes useful when it concerns what actually happened during the talk.

End with an action the audience can realistically understand and choose. For these volunteers, that might be attending an orientation or requesting more information through an accessible contact route. Avoid an inflated emotional demand that the organization cannot support afterward. After the event, record what questions people asked and what the invitation left unclear. Improvement continues after applause; it depends on learning whether the speech helped anyone do the thing it was intended to help them do.